Do yards per carry increase with experience?

Jan 28, 2016

I was wondering if Michigan running backs generally improve their Yards Per Carry as they gain more experience. I plotted the top 200 rushers Yards Per Carry vs. Games Played and ran a linear regression on the data. I filtered out any game with 5 or less attempts.

The verdict: as number of games increases there seems to be minimal improvement in Yards Per Carry. The YPC regression line intercepts zero at about 4.3 YPC and the slope of the line is nearly zero (but just slightly positive). Data sourced from the Michigan Athletic Statistics Archive.